To beget or not to beget...

I just received my free (!) copy of 100 Questions and Answers about Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, the book that you too can get free here. (Thanks to RW at Tummy Troubles for blogging about it.)

A little ways in, the authors mention pregnancy and the possibility of passing UC/Crohn's on to your children. According to them, there's no predictable outcome; your kids could be carriers of the gene and not be affected, and there's always the question of your partner's genetic code figuring into the mix. Which is kind of funny, because A. has told me some side-splitting stories about gut-fun in his ancestry, including one about his dad, a pound of cherries, and an isolated construction site.

Which I will not recount here out of respect for privacy of bowels not my own.

The overall tone of the book is very hopeful. I can almost hear my old CNP, my third health professional who was also the first genuinely helpful one, outline colitis the way she did on our first session: bad parts first and fast, good parts longer and last. This was alternately good and bad in its own way. She got me to think more optimistically about my disease, but because we rarely discussed (and thankfully, had few occasions to do so) the awful side of UC, I find myself flinching when I re-read or hear things like "25 percent increase in risk of colon cancer when the entire colon is involved" and "newborn diagnosed with ulcerative colitis" though that last is pretty rare, I think.

It's not that I want to my doctors to blackout their windows and greet me with foaming blood capsules and bags of peeled grapes. I like to think positively about UC, and about the cancer that probably looms in my future, and about having children, even if I don't really like kids generally.

Because, parenthetically speaking, my children would of course be AWESOME.

A. refuses to discuss the subject because he says I change my mind about it too often to have a decent, reasonable argument. But I wonder if he sometimes has second thoughts about our relationship: if it's hard to deal with me when I have a flare-up, how would he handle a child with the same problem? Back to the point, I don't want to be told to prepare myself for the hard times ahead every time I shell out an office visit copay, and doctors must know that better than anyone.

But I love scary movies. That's scary, which does not always mean senseless gorefest a la Captivity. (Yes, the girl who enjoys They Live and Black Christmas and The Last Man on Earth does have some standards, but the publicity campaigns for Captivity seemed to have none.) Scary encompasses thriller, splatter, cornball, psychological and gothic horror. And this love of being scared could explain my magnetic attraction to UC and medication side effects lists.

Besides, what's freakier than being stuck in 28 Days Later or any apocalyptic zombie flick, for that matter, without your UC meds? Nothing!